Seven years ago today, a man in a black turtle neck and jeans walked out on stage and proclaimed “today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone”. That man, Steve Jobs, couldn’t have been more right.
Whether you love it or hate it, the iPhone started a mobile revolution. No longer were phones just for calling, texting or playing snake – they were a powerful computer in the palm of your hands, and one that is now used by billions of people around the world.
The first iPhone didn’t actually ship until June 2007, and the model that Jobs showed on stage was a buggy mess: he’d spent days rehearsing to try and avoid any stuff-ups. Jobs was skating on the thinnest ice, trying to start a revolution with something that barely worked, but he got through it without a slip-up. By October 2013, Apple had sold more than 150 million iPhones worldwide – here’s how the iPhone has changed our lives in that time:
7. It created the ‘phone fan boy’
Seeing sports fans fight over their respective teams is one thing, but seeing the heat between an iPhone supporter and an Android supporter is something else entirely. After the iPhone was released, competitors soon followed, with most of those coming from Google’s Android platform. Android users immediately hated the iPhone and in turn, were loathed by iPhone users. The fan boy war had begun.
6. It made technology a fashion statement
Apple started this back with the iPod, but it wasn’t until the iPhone came out that people really started to look at pieces of technology as statements about a person and their social status. The frenzy of an iPhone launch quickly propelled the tech world into the mainstream. Before this, having some high tech phone or gadget made you a nerd, but these days you’re scoffed at if you don’t have the latest and greatest in mobile phone technology. What’s that? A Blackberry? Shame on you, my friend.
5. It changed how we used computers
As much as the iPhone is a mobile phone, it’s just as much a computer and in a classic Apple move, they found the best way for us to interact with one. “We are all born with the ultimate pointing device – our fingers – and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse,” Steve Jobs once said. He couldn’t have been more right. The use of Apple’s new super responsive capacitive touch screen changed everything, and made us yearn for touch screens on all our devices. Now we couldn’t imagine phones any other way.
4. It made arguments boring
You used to be able to go on for ages debating with family and friends over something you both thought you knew best about. Thanks to the iPhone, though, you can just quickly jump on the web to get the evidence without screaming at your grandma about why she is wrong.
3. It changed more than one industry
It wasn’t just the mobile industry that was forever changed by the iPhone – thanks to its ability to play games, get music straight from the web, take usable pictures and watch video on the go, it also completely turned all those industries upside down and forced them to adapt in a way they never had to before. It has made some industries – like that of the MP3 player – obsolete, and has also helped create new multi-billion dollar industries like app studios and tablets.
2. There’s an app for that
When Apple’s second generation phone, the iPhone 3G got released with a new app store, it revolutionised the phone yet again. We now use our phone to tell us where to go, what to eat, to play games on and to monitor our bodies.
1. Internet. Any time. Anywhere.
Perhaps the biggest change ushered in by the iPhone is that it’s created an age of internet that can be accessed anywhere, at any time. It gave us access to emails wherever we were, showed the world that its actually possible to browse the internet on our phones with ease and showed the way for apps like Instagram, Foursquare and Viber, which have each changed our lives themselves.
